Something like this happened at the public school in my town. A girl sent racy photos of herself to a boy from a different school, and he began sharing them with his friends, who shared it with people they knew. Within three days, the photos actually got back to her brother, who recognized that it was her because the tiles in the background were the exact same ones in their own bathroom at home. Given, this did begin a campaign for Internet literacy in the school district, but the administration had no idea how to handle it. I've heard stories about "revenge porn" where a woman involved called police wanting to press charges for online harrassment, yet the officers sent to work with her did not know what Twitter was, and she had to verbally explain it to him.

"Exploiting" is beyond an understatement! There are so many people who promote their garage bands or wannabe viral videos just by sharing it in every group or page they can find.

I agree that in 2013 Facebook and Instagram probably weren't seen as peculiar, but I have to disagree on the Tumblr front. It was mostly a niche market for "fandoms" and the like until the middle of 2014.

I can't believe that this is almost eight years ago! It was a huge deal when my older sister got a flip phone with a camera, much less an iPhone, and now phones are pretty much the leading means of photography, which can be both a good and a bad thing. Good because when you see something fascinating or strange, you wouldn't have to snap your fingers and say "Gee! I'd take a picture of that if I could!" You could just take it. Bad because...well...obvious reasons of privacy and so forth. My grandmother and my younger (4-7 year old) cousins have little arguments about this. They absolutely refuse to believe that she did not have TV and only a few dozen photographs taken of her family growing up. They, meanwhile, have had thousands of photos and videos shot of them, and Gram has just a shoebox and a reel of film.

I actually find this kind of mail hilarious when it does come into my mailbox. Thank goodness email boxes can filter out Spam and other things meant purely for promotion. I will say, though, that receiving a message in the mail is more personal than receiving it through an email, even if it is only addressed to one person. My dad sometimes has to hire people for his office, and he always shows a preference for those who send written thank-yous as opposed to emailed ones.

I wonder what these engineers think of the pay-to-read websites for scholarly articles. In terms of making decisions, the unfortunate part of it is that many people get the wrong information, because anyone can post it. Whenever I scroll through my News Feed I tend to see an older family member ranting about something on their Facebook wall, usually accompanied by a link. Nine times out of ten, the link will come from Wikipedia or even The Onion. The former, or course, is something anyone can edit (my brother once changed Abraham Lincoln's birthday to his own), and the latter is just a parody website, which almost nobody over the age of 50 can grasp. What's really worrying, though, is what it may do to the kids who grow up with it. I grew up with dial-up and an AIM account that I never used, and mainly used the computer for PC games. I was taught how to write in script and it was natural to look in the library for information until I was in sixth grade. This new generation is going to grow up doubting almost everything they learn online. While it is good to have a bit of disbelief while learning, it's impossible to learn something sufficiently and simultaneously be fully questioning of it.

As someone interested in pursuing a journalism career, I'm shocked to hear both parts of this sentence. Yahoo is the biggest place for people to get news? While I never expected it to be the New York Times or Time or anything, I was thinking of a place originally meant to give news, like Buzzfeed or maybe Huffington Post - but Yahoo? A search engine, and a subpar one at that? I did some digging and as it turns out, as of 10/1/15, Google News is actually #2. The second part also disturbs me - different people get different things. It sounds unfair - to use a dinosaur of an example, if you and your friend both subscribed to Entertainment Weekly, and were both sent the October issue, your copy may have an interview with Tom Cruise, but your friend's may have a photo spread with the cast of Star Wars. It wouldn't be okay for a print publication to send different things to people who subscribe, so why is it okay online?